Supply Chain Resilience A Study on Disruption and Recovery Strategies

Abstract

Globalization and increasing competition among the organizations have steered them towards being efficient. In the process of optimizing their networks, organizations have minimized redundancies and backups in their Supply Chain (SC) whilst increasing the bottlenecks and weaker links. This makes the SC networks vulnerable to disruptions thereby reducing their performance during disruptions. This mandates the SC networks to be resilient enough to absorb the shocks of disruptions, adapt to the changes, and continue to operate at desired levels. The occurrence of High-Impact Low Frequency (HILF) events from time to time have hatched the concept of Supply Chain Resilience (SCR). As this would be useful for the organizations across various industries, the present study addresses multiple dimensions of resilience such as modelling and validation of the drivers of SCR, assessing the impact of disruptions in terms of losses incurred, analysing the effects of incorporating resilience strategies in organizations, and quantifying multiple aspects of resilience using multiple indices. The research would provide multi-dimensional insights into various aspects and attributes of resilience that could be useful to mitigate risks in the future. Also, the potential bottlenecks and weak attributes of SCR could be strengthened to avoid ripple effects that disrupt the flow of operations. The present research involves successive multiple studies that address resilience from a different perspective. The essence of each of them is outlined successively. newlineThe initial phase of work adopts a mixed-methods approach to build a conceptual model for drivers of SCR and validate it. Initially, 25 drivers were chosen, mapped across the traditional drivers of SC, and associations between them were defined based on the understanding from literature. Two other drivers namely Managerial and External were added considering the uncertainties that are beyond the control of an organization. Further, the associations were revised through a brainstorming..